Diversify Within a Single Niche

One of the questions that often comes my way from online entrepreneurs goes something like this …

“I want to have multiple streams of income and not put all my eggs in one basket. Shouldn’t I have a presence in many different and varied niches to protect my income?”

The logic of the argument seems sound, doesn’t it? To a lot of folks, having one business with many different products in many niches seems like the safe and sound way to proceed in setting up a business empire. Then if one product, or even a niche, either dries up or becomes too overrun with competition, there are still numerous other income streams to keep the profit coming in.

But my own feelings on this approach are pretty definite about going in a different direction.

I tend to sit in the camp that says to focus on the quality of your site and products as that’s what really sells. Quantity doesn’t guarantee anything except a lot of work to maintain each site. Now I’m not suggesting that you have only one web site or just one product. I’ll finish this thought in a moment.

But first, let me ask you … “How are you going to maintain and keep lots of small web sites up to date and relevant?” I think you’ll agree that it’s going to require a lot of your time and energy to track and keep fresh unique content on many small sites. My experience has been that those who attempt to maintain an empire of little sites in many varied niches typically neglect those that aren’t making much money and focus on just the few that are providing a decent return. That is what you would expect, right?

Google, in several of it’s algorithm updates over the past 8-10 years, has penalized “thin” web sites. Those are sites that have little value for the viewer, that are usually thrown up hastily and not given much on-going attention by the web master. The sites are still there online, but Google does not value them much and they receive little organic attention (search engine referrals). It only makes sense, right? Google is interested in the user experience for its customers and sending search traffic to a site that has little to offer except maybe a paid product and possibly a few rehashed articles as “filler” is not going to win Google any brownie points with its customers.

What good are lots of sites that gather dust and make very few, if any sales at all?

So how do you not put all your eggs in one basket and ensure multiple streams of income?

Here’s the thing … you can have multiple streams of income and not put all your eggs in one basket even though you have one business and one main site.

Your focus must be on building or licensing (or having others create for you) multiple backend products and/or services. That’s where having some quantity of products and/or services can protect your income from shutting down when a particular product becomes outdated or sales dwindle for some other reason.

When you think about the tasks that most people would agree you need to accomplish with your website like adding content, building a relationship with customers, sending out emails, doing SEO (onsite and off), getting back links, advertising, forum posting, creating multiple back ends, etc, etc, etc … it makes the choice even easier … focus on doing business in your niche really well. Become the “go to” business for multiple solutions within the same audience.

How can you really accomplish all these important web site and traffic generating tasks if you have lots and lots of web sites? About the only answer is to outsource the work and pay others to help you. Ratcheting up your business in this manner brings with it a whole lot of other issues that we won’t address in this post. Most people new to online business don’t need to be taking on employees or trying to figure out how to outsource until their business grows to the point where the workload forces the owner to leverage his/her time.

You have to remember that sales and income are the direct result of marketing. If you spend an inordinate amount of time on “building” sites and products for various and sundry niches (that is, the “setup phase” of the business) your sales will generally reflect that fact. Especially in the early years of a new business, it helps greatly if the owner can focus on promoting just one main business idea as he attempts to get “traction” and momentum in that niche.

Just remember that there are an inordinate number ways a business owner can spend his/her time working in an Internet business. But many of the tasks the owner might do really don’t bring in revenue directly. Working on new products, trying to increase the business conversion rate, and gathering new customers and prospects are the things that will help the business bottom line directly.

Focus on marketing . . . putting offers in front of targeted customers. Sales for the business is what you should be about!